After launching the platform’s mainnet on January 31, the Zilliqa team has made the next major step in the evolution of the Zilliqa blockchain. The platform, which utilizes sharding technology to try and get a scalability edge over the competition, now supports smart contracts written in Zilliqa’s Scillla programming language.

As far as the Scilla language is concerned, Zilliqa president and CSO Amrit Kumar outlines four key features – suitability for formal verification, static analyzers that help detect bugs in a contract before it is deployed, separation between different smart contract components and safe standard libraries that eliminate the need for external libraries for selected operations.

Kumar also outlined Zilliqa’s vision of having a presence in a wide spectrum of industries:

“Smart contracts will help us further our footprint across a range of sectors — whether it is financial services, media and advertising, or gaming and entertainment. I eagerly look forward to witnessing how this technology unfolds, disrupts and evolves, and how we are able to build on it.”

Zilliqa’s sharding-based architecture is designed to improve the network’s throughput as the size of the network increases. To an extent, Zilliqa uses proof-of-work to secure its network. However, proof-of-work is not used in the consensus process, as its only role in Zilliqa is to fend off Sybil attacks. Consensus is reached via a PBFT protocol within each Zilliqa shard.

The ZIL token has performed well in the last 24 hours, increasing by 6.6%. ZIL is also a strong performer in the last 30 days, as the token is up 55% on the month. With the smart contract functionality now enabled, it will be fascinating to follow how the ZIL’s price action develops in the future.